Thai-m of my life

Alright, to avoid my mom disowning me for lack of blog posts I will update my blog.  To get all cliche on you, I can't help but feel like there's so much I want to blog about, but at the same time I can't quite put my Thailand trip into words.  Luckily I just had a late coffee date with my ladies, so what better way to use my caffeine buzz than to blog.  So here goes.

Thailand may have been the best vacation I will ever experience.  First off, we had a great group of people on our trip.  There were seven of us total (Chrissy, Jen, Julie, Joe, Ryan, Amanda, and me) and we all got along surprisingly well.  We also ran into three other groups of travelers that we knew from Korea and hung out with them quite a bit.  We spent two nights in Bangkok, took a mini-bus to an island off of the Thai coast (Koh Chang) for five nights, and then went back to Bangkok for two days.  

I was not expecting to like Bangkok as much as I did.  It was filled with tourists, a bit of a change from Korea, and had a very laid back vibe about it.  There was great shopping and cheap food.  Thailand is a vegetarian's paradise.  I think they are trying to cater to all the hippies who travel to Thailand by offering so many veg-friendly options, but whatever the reason, the food was amazing.  I ate so much pad thai and so many spring rolls, I probably don't need to see another spring roll for a year.  Also, I even went to a vegetarian restaurant where I had a veggie burger and some great hummus.  I don't mean to get all foodie on you, but I've been missing veggie burgers since the moment I stepped off the plane in Korea, so although they were not the same veggie burgers as in the U.S. I still welcomed them with open arms.  

In Koh Chang we went snorkeling, rode elephants in the jungle, rented scooters and drove around the island, laid on the beach, went to bars on the beach, and overall just had an amazingly relaxed time.  Word of advice, if you're ever planning on traveling to Thailand and you don't want to spend a lot of money or stay at incredibly extravagant places, do not book anything in advance.  We had heard this advice and heeded it for the most part, but we did make the mistake of booking bungalows in Bangkok for Koh Chang when we really didn't need to.  We ended up not being in the middle of the action for the first three nights and had to take taxis to get to the main beach areas.  Then the last two nights we ended up getting bungalows on the beach for half the price and twice the convenience.  Also, these bungalows were owned by a ladyboy which is a Thai phenomenon.  Basically men take female hormones from puberty on to become women.  There were many Thai women I had to look twice at to figure out whether they were really women or ladyboys.  Yes, the sex trade is alive and well in Thailand.  

The snorkeling was fantastic.  We took a boat out to three different islands and swam around them.  The last island was very secluded with a gorgeous beach and would be a great place to really get away.  I saw some great schools of fish, much better than the snorkeling I've done before.  Here's a picture from one of the islands we stopped at:

Riding elephants was also an experience.  I think I have a new obsession with elephants.  The only thing that I didn't like is I'm not entirely sure how humanely they treat the elephants.  We rode in groups of two with a guide.  The guides all had these poking stick things.  At once point my guide hit the elephant with the stick.  I cringed a bit and he gestured that it's nothing more than a scratch to the elephants.  But I don't know, a few of them had red marks on their heads.  We rode into the jungle with the elephants and stopped at a small quarry to swim with the elephants.  A few of us jumped in with them, not realizing that the elephants like to use the water as their own public restroom.  Not long after we started swimming with them, we noticed green blobs of poo coming from the elephants.  The lake was not large so we were basically swimming in a large elephant toilet.  Luckily the guides did fish out a lot of the poo and put it in a big poo pile on the side of the pool, but I was a little skeeved out after seeing this.  Here's a picture of us swimming with the elephants:

Because I feel the need for speed (not really, I'm just lame), I think one of my favorite parts of Koh Chang was renting scooters and driving around the island.  Instead of having a final beach day like the rest of the group, Joe and I rented scooters and drove around the island.  This outing almost didn't happen for a couple reasons.  First off, can we just appreciate the fact that I rented a scooter for 24 hours for $8?  Amazing, yes.  Joe didn't have his license on him, but that doesn't seem to matter in Thailand.  So we rented our scooters with my driver's license, Joe's passport number, and no training about how to use scooters.  Neither of us had ever ridden before.  Our instructions included, here's how to turn it on, here's the throttle, pull down on the throttle to get started.  Joe started his scooter first and attempted to merge onto the road.  Instead, he and the scooter went shooting out into the middle of the road, side swiped a taxi and managed to stop on the other side of the road.  It was simultaneously frightening and hilarious.  There were many panicked looks around us.  Then he gave it another try and again shot out into the road and almost fell over.  At this point I was thinking maybe this scootering thing was not such a good idea.  Luckily I managed to receive a little more instruction from the scooters' owners and I eased down on the throttle.  That proved effective and Joe got the hang of it and we were on our way.  We drove up and down the main area of the island.  At one point we found an interesting road that led into the jungle.  Then we thought we found another interesting road.  Instead, it led us up a steep hill, past some chickens in the road (I almost hit two) to a garbage dump.  We also drove up and down some very steep hills (I prefer to call them mountains) which were incredibly scary and we probably shouldn't have been driving on them because we were complete scooter neophytes, but we also saw some spectacular views of the island and ocean.  The following day we took Julie and Chrissy scooting with us.  Joe had some trouble with one of his tires, so Julie, Chrissy and I ended up riding back to town all on my scooter.  That was quite fun and unfortunately I didn't get a good picture of the three of us piled on my scooter.  Here's a view from one of the hills (mountains) we rode on:

Back in Bangkok we saw some temples, the famous reclining Buddha, and we went on a boat cruise around the canals of Bangkok. Here's a picture of the reclining Buddha:
There was a lot more that happened on our trip, but these are just a few highlights.  Maybe if you're lucky, I will do another post about Thailand.  But you can check out my pictures of Thailand here to see some more adventures.  I took some of these pictures, and others I stole from my vacation mates.  Enjoy.